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And then
they were three -- again
Yahoo! had bought no less that three search engines (Inktomi,
AlltheWeb and AltaVista), and by combining these technologies
Yahoo's programmers developed Yahoo! Search. Yahoo! Search
replaced Google as the search engine of the Yahoo! portal.
AltaVista and AlltheWeb also ceased to exist as search engines
in their own right. They are now powered by the new Yahoo!
Search search engine.
Microsoft's MSN.com,
which used to be powered by Inktomi, also found itself using
the new Yahoo! search technology. However, the success of
Google had made Bill Gates realize that the future of the
Internet lies in the hands of the search engines.
Given that Yahoo!
already had bought the best search engines on the market,
Microsoft decided to develop their own search engine. In December
they presented a beta version of this search engine for general
testing.
In spite of the fact that MSN
Search is still in beta, early next year the search engine
scene will be dominated by three giants -- Google, Yahoo!
and MSN, followed by two important runners up: Ask
Jeeves/Teoma and Gigablast.
This is good for searchers, as none of the existing search
engines are able to cover all the web. Moreover, the competition
will lead to more innovation and more useful features.
The search engine marketing community is also happy. They
can now provide services for three to five regular search
engines instead of one essential search engine. That's bound
to result in more demand and more revenue.
Google Knows a Lot About
You Google knows a lot about you. They do
everything they can to try to track your activities online,
and even put a cookie on your PC. This
page tells you how to anonymize the Google cookie. And
if you're really interested, check out Things
google knows about you.
If you're an website owner, then you should probably know
exactly what they know about you and the websites they know
that you own. For example, I would suspect that they probably
don't give you much link credit for linking the sites together
that you own and have control over.
Not only is it scary that they're doing so much that we don't
know about, they're using that knowledge to their advantage--to
figure out which sites you own, figure out what search terms
you care about, and if you're an Adsense publisher then they
even know your personal contact information and can put it
all together in a profile for their monetary benefit. Webproworld
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